While President Petro Poroshenko has capably steered Ukraine out of a debilitating political crisis and consolidated the political system as a de facto presidential republic, the window for radical reforms appears
to be closing. Key Western partners are increasingly distracted by other challenges and frustrated by Kyiv’s reluctance to crack down on high-level corruption and banish old ways of doing business. Ukraine crisis and the Donbas conflict becomes less of an acute issue for Western policymakers. The challenge will be to keep the pressure on leaders in Kyiv to deliver meaningful reforms that might benefit the general population, make reconciliation with Donbas a mainstream policy in Ukraine while convincing the Kremlin to engage seriously on the search for a diplomatic solution amid a continued impasse over implementation of the Minsk accords. For a long time, the West has both underestimated and misunderstood the country‘s challenges. Balázs Jarábik, a long term international development executive and a seasoned scholar of Eastern European politics, will summarize the relations offering a vision how to amend Western policy toward Ukraine and the region in troubled times.
Balázs Jarábik is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Jarábik worked with Pact, Inc. in Kyiv, Ukraine to build its presence as one of the largest international nongovernmental organizations in Eastern Europe. He currently
serves as a project director for Pact, based in Vilnius, Lithuania. He recently joined the Central European Policy Institute in Bratislava as a fellow. He also worked as an adviser for political parties and civil societies in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, with the Slovak parliament and ministry of foreign affairs, and with several international institutions.
Moderation: Dr. Roman Dubasevych